About Ted Rall

Ted Rall is the political cartoonist at ANewDomain.net, editor-in-chief of SkewedNews.net, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is the author of the biography "Trump," to be published in July 2016.

@ Jack Heart –
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I apologize for my total misunderstanding of your comment. (I tend to be a literalist and often become confused. 😉 )
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After reading your explanation, I reviewed the comments and determined that you are 100% correct with your observation. This leads me to believe that *exkiodexian* is trolling (in addition to his having ignored my comment regarding his obvious lack of language skills), so henceforth I will skip over his posts. Thanks for the “heads-up”!

I have come to the realization that *Sekhmet* and *exkiodexian* are two fictitious personae (read *trolls*) that actually represent the same individual. The tactic *it* uses is to post as one and then to post as the other in order to garner more attention. Unfortunately for me, I failed to heed my own advice and ignore this *troll* – but I won’t make that mistake again. It’s an exercise in futility. 😀

In the US, being ruled by Platonic philosopher kings (the 1 %), fisticuffs and airgun battles over philosophic matters are, of course, utterly irrelevant. Besides, you have Samantha Power at the UNO to keep your «moral compasses» pointing to true North….

“Since no one mentioned Sam Harris between ex, I’ll assume he can see comments I cannot.”
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Assuming you mistyped “between” and meant “before,” let me call your attention to the post from aaronwilliams135
September 25, 2013 at 1:43 PM

D’oh! Left out the most important contemporary American Thinker. You want to talk about an American who cares about ideas? Check out Sam Harris.

Why, you ask, is any of this a big deal? So what, right? Sam Harris claims to be a liberal and a deep-thinker, and he parades this garbage around under the guise of being a rational atheist and a liberal.

@Ted: I’m shocked that you haven’t — but here’s a piece of career advice. If you want some traffic, just write something criticizing Sam Harris. His fanboys will explode with rage and go to whatever site/person is criticizing him and flood the boards in his defense. It’s instant-traffic.

One can’t pick a fight with Sam Harris, because he is — by definition — one of the most intellectually dishonest frauds in recent memory. Greenwald’s public drubbing of him is just one example. There’s virtually not one intellectual of note that regards Sam Harris as anything but a fraud, and a small-minded one at that. Oh — unless you include relic Dawkins, who shares Harris’ glee at racist diatribes against Muslims.

Isn’t it interesting to note that the one outlet that Sam Harris can appear on is Fox News, which he does regularly. He’s been on O’Reilly many, many times calling for the incineration of Iran, and essentially engaging in his racist diatribes. Gee — I wonder why that is! I wonder why only Fox will have Harris on as a guest regularly. Actually, it’s not hard to understand at all — but that fact makes his so-called liberal fanboys heads explode.

No one takes Harris seriously. The man is pathetic pseudo-intellectual and a dishonest one at that. I have actually had the please of debating Sam in email once and I can say from experience: There’s no statement he’s ever made that he will defend honestly. He’s as dishonest a person as I’ve ever come across. He’s repugnant, and will be forgotten.

Your quote: “–It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death.”

We are in a tepid war with Pakistan, the ONLY Islamic republic with nuclear weapons. That is, killing people on their soil.

There isn’t a mutual threat of nuclear annihilation between the United States and Pakistan. As far as we know, Pakistan does not possess ICBMs and therefore poses no substantial threat to the United States. How are they going to send their nuclear weapons, by mail?

More to the point, most of the Pakistani leadership is tacitly complicit with the drone attacks.

Sam Harris does too, and in picking a fight with him, Exkiodexian has bitten off more than he can chew.

It is not Sam’s first trip around the block, and here is his response to this type of criticism, with full text available through the link at the bottom.

“My position on preemptive nuclear war:

The journalist Chris Hedges has repeatedly claimed (in print, in public lectures, on the radio, and on television) that I advocate a nuclear first-strike against the Muslim world. His remarks, which have been recycled continually in interviews and blog posts, generally take the following form: I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. (Q&A at Harvard Divinity School, March 20, 2008)

Harris, echoing the blood lust of Hitchens, calls, in his book The End of Faith, for a nuclear first strike against the Islamic world. (The Dangerous Atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, Alternet, March 22, 2008)

And you have in Sam Harris’ book, “The End of Faith,” a call for us to consider a nuclear first strike against the Arab world. This isn’t rational. This is insane. (The Tavis Smiley Show, April 15, 2008)

Sam Harris, in his book The End of Faith, asks us to consider carrying out a nuclear first-strike on the Arab world. That’s not a rational option—that’s insanity. (A Conversation with Chris Hedges, Free Inquiry, August/September 2008)

Wherever they appear, Hedges’s comments are clearly meant to leave the impression that I want the U.S. government to start killing Muslims by the tens of millions. Below I present the only passage I have ever written on the subject of preventive nuclear war and the only passage that Hedges could be referring to in my work (The End of Faith, pp. 128-129):

–It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world’s population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher’s stone, and unicorns. That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen. Indeed, given the immunity to all reasonable intrusions that faith enjoys in our discourse, a catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly likely. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our side.–

Clearly, I was describing a case in which a hostile regime that is avowedly suicidal acquires long-range nuclear weaponry (i.e. they can hit distant targets like Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, etc.). Of course, not every Muslim regime would fit this description. For instance, Pakistan already has nuclear weapons, but they have yet to develop long-range rockets, and there is every reason to believe that the people currently in control of these bombs are more pragmatic and less certain of paradise than the Taliban are. The same could be said of Iran, if it acquires nuclear weapons in the near term (though not, perhaps, from the perspective of Israel, for whom any Iranian bomb will pose an existential threat). But the civilized world (including all the pragmatic Muslims living within it) must finally come to terms with what the ideology of groups like the Taliban, al Qaeda, etc. means—because it destroys the logic of deterrence. There are a significant number of people in the Muslim world for whom the slogan “We love death more than the infidel loves life” appears to be an honest statement of psychological fact, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from getting long-range nuclear weapons.”

Sam goes much deeper into his critique of Islam and many other controversial topics here:

As expected, the pseudo-intellectual fanboys rush to their messiah’s defense. Good old Sam Harris, who called for a first strike nuclear policy against Iran if they don’t stop enriching uranium. That’s Sam though — calling for the incineration of millions because he thinks their religion will cause them to use nuclear weapons against the West. What can one say about such deranged logic? Not much, but the fanboys circle the wagons. It’s all they know how to do.

(his) intellectual cowardice and dishonesty, his uncanny ability to distort his detractors criticisms of him, and his own lies to cover for his own repugnant statements. (He) never met a straw argument he didn’t like, never met a fact he was happy to ignore if it refuted his worldview…

“D’oh! Left out the most important contemporary American Thinker. You want to talk about an American who cares about ideas? Check out Sam Harris.”

Oh christ, it’s a Harris fanboy. The only fanboy worse than a Harris fanboy is a Hitchens fanboy, but thankfully that repugnant pig is dead and buried. Harris picked up his pseudo-intellectual mantle though, and his fanboys quickly adopted this phony thinker as their new messiah. Harris is an abysmal coward, an intellectual fraud hiding behind his credentials and gaining a following because of his unrepentant Muslim bashing.

There’s numerous examples of Sam Harris’ intellectual cowardice and dishonesty, his uncanny ability to distort his detractors criticisms of him, and his own lies to cover for his own repugnant statements. Sam Harris never met a straw argument he didn’t like, never met a fact he was happy to ignore if it refuted his worldview, never for slippery Sam.

But — don’t anger a fanboy. They’re likely to snap in defense of their dear messiah. For he must be defended at all costs.

I read it yesterday and it was good. My post on Ted’s event is gone too and all I did was wish him well with it. HIS post is gone from the previous comic and I couldn’t get on this morning, so I’m sure it is technical.

Did my post just cease to exist here? I don’t think it was moderated; it was critical of already-unrespected conspiracy theories (and television) — safe targets, so I doubt that it would have been deemed offensive. Is there a technical problem? I’m nearly 100% sure the post went up before.

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Books By Ted Rall:

Publication Date: March 13, 2018
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He thought his church career was drawing to a close. Then he was asked to take over a Catholic Church in crisis.
Religiosity was in decline in the West. And the Catholic Church was in bigger trouble than any other institution you could think of. Losing parishioners, shrinking in power and prestige and discredited by corruption and sex…

Publication Date: December 12, 2017
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Legendary infiltration journalist Harmon Leon is at it again, this time teaming up with ferocious political cartoonist Ted Rall answer the question most of America has been asking: "What the hell happened in 2016?" In their new book, Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America, Leo…

Publication Date: July 26, 2016
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Everyone in America thought they knew Donald Trump: the real estate magnate, reality TV star and bigger than life personality lived his life in the tabloids. Little did they know - though he hinted at it repeatedly - that he planned to take American politics by storm. This graphic biography explores the little-known episodes that helped form…

Publication Date: January 19, 2016
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As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders was surrounded by grinding poverty that turned families against each other as they scrimped and saved to pay their bills.
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Publication Date: August 25, 2015
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As many as 1.4 million citizens with security clearance saw some or all of the same documents revealed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Why did he, and no one else, decide to step forward and take on the risks associated with becoming a whistleblower and then a fugitive? Rall's all-comic, full-color biography delves into Snowden's early l…

An independent account—in words and pictures—of America’s longest war from the beginning of the end to the end of the beginning.
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I made two trips, the first in the wake of 9/11, the next ten years later…

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This autobiographical graphic novel is a collaboration between me (my story, my writing) and Bluesman cartoonist Pablo G. Callejo. Travel with me to 1984, the year I lost everything. The place is New York City. In the space of a few months, I got expelled from Columbia University, fired from my job, arrested for drugs that weren't even mine, dumped by the girl I thought was The One, and evicted. I…

My fourth cartoon collection collects the work that made me America's most controversial cartoonist. Here are the classic "dirty dozen" cartoons that shocked and awed newspaper readers after 9/11: "Terror Widows" and its sequels, "FDNY 2011," the Pat Tillman series. There is also a lengthy introduction and commentary, which includes behind-the-scenes looks at the hate mail and death threats that p…

This is the book I wanted to write instead of To Afghanistan and Back — everything you ever wanted to know about Central Asia, without having had to attend grad school — but didn't have time. Five years later, I was able to release my Central Asia brain dump, a book anyone can read cold and come away understanding the importance of the region and why it's so interesting.
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The final volume in the "Attitude" trilogy of alternative cartoonists is dedicated to the first wave of webcartoonists (cartoonists whose work is exclusively distributed online). Includes interviews, cartoons and personal ephemera about some of the most exciting artists to lay pen to paper — or stylus to Wacom. Here you'll find political cartoonists, humorists and dazzling graphic experiments, and…

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The second installment in the "Attitude" trilogy of interviews, cartoons and photos of America's top alternative cartoonists emphasizes cartoonists who deploy novel approaches to humor and the comics medium. Politics are still important, but take a back seat to social commentary in this collection.
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The result of painstaking research and analysis, "Gas War" is the definitive behind-the scenes story of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAP) project. Conceived during the 1990s under Bill Clinton, the idea was for the United States to control the vast, newly-tapped Caspian Sea oil and gas reserves — which by some measures exceed those of Saudi Arabia — by building an oil and gas pipeline from Turk…

"The New Subversive Political Cartoonists" is the first volume in my '"Attitude" trilogy: the definitive record of the political cartooning scene that exploded in alternative weekly newspapers during the 1980s and 1990s. It features interviews of, cartoons by and photos and ephemera about 21 ground-breaking alternative political cartoonists who revolutionized the form. The Iowa City Gazette called…

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Ted Rall is the political cartoonist at ANewDomain.net, editor-in-chief of SkewedNews.net, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is the author of the biography "Trump," to be published in July 2016.